Olympic Games touch all China's hotspots

BEIJING — From the Great Wall to Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s major sites of interest want in on the buzz generated by the Olympics. The Games are expected to inject some 105.5 billion yuan ($13.4 billion) into Beijing’s GDP between 2004 and 2008.

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Even the Lama temple, a sacred site where worshipers come to burn incense and pray, is capitalizing off the Olympics. This isn’t surprising, considering the site is owned by the state, which wants to tap into tourists’ pocketbooks. In this video you can see the holy shrine inside the temple walls, and just steps away there’s a gift shop selling Olympics paraphernalia.

This video below shows the pandemonium at Wangfujing, a major shopping district in Beijing, where tourists and locals jostle for Olympic wares. The priciest item I saw was a set of Olympic mascots carved in jade, worth about $48,000.